Manuel Rigger

SQLancer will be part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program again this year! We are looking for motivated contributors as well as database development teams who would like to have their systems tested. summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/202...

As a reviewer and reader, I also feel quite frustrated about this. Using LLMs for (minor) presentation improvements is one thing, but, increasingly, the problem and solution seem to be mainly framed through LLMs, often in rather shallow and recurring ways.

We just implemented trai (try + AI) (github.com/binpash/trai), a Claude plugin that can help you isolate 🫷 changes done in your file system by tool calls (like pip install), and only commit them if they are intended ☺️. Try it out (pun intended) and share your feedback!

All CI/CD tests pass for SQLancer! They were failing for a long time due to changes in database systems, dependencies, and software versions. All thanks to Claude! In the process, Claude also mostly independently analyzed, reduced, and reported various regression bugs.

📢 Call for Artifact Evaluation Reviewers! Join the ASE 2026 & ISSTA 2026 AE committees. Support open science while gaining an inside look at top-tier research artifacts. 📝 Apply now: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... 🔁 Please boost! #ASE2026 #ISSTA2026

Our proposal for a Shonan Seminar on "The Next 50 Years of SQL" has been accepted! Excited to co-host with Viktor Leis and Jeff Shute in September 2027. We'll bring together researchers and practitioners in database systems, programming languages, and beyond.

1/3 New Lean use case: Veil, a multi-modal verification framework for distributed protocols from George Pîrlea, Vladimir Gladshtein, Elad Kinsbruner, Qiyuan Zhao, and Ilya Sergey at NUS.

Applications are still open until April 5th! Come join an amazing group of passionate, interdisciplinary researchers at the intersection of CV and Ecology as we teach the next generation of ecologists to develop their own AI-enabled approaches to scale their ecological research!

Do you want to be my new colleague in Stuttgart? We opened a tenured professor position for researchers in Programming Languages. So, if you are working in this field, please consider applying. If you are not in this field, please repost and boost. 📣 www.f05.uni-stuttgart.de/en/faculty/n...

We’re introducing #TenSure (github.com/KabilanMA/Te...), the first black-box fuzzer built specifically for sparse tensor compilers. This work is a collaboration with Yining Zhang, Muhammad Ali Gulzar, and @kirshanthans.bsky.social at Virginia Tech.

DuckDB was added to the wall of fame of CWI, next to Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm, the Atlantic Crossing of the Internet & the creation of Python On the occasion of our 80th (really!) bday Congrats to @hannes.muehleisen.org & @markraasveldt.bsky.social @duckdb.org @cwi-amsterdam.bsky.social

New post on "Proofs and Intuitions": Verifying Distributed Protocols in Veil. We take a tour of Veil, a Lean-based verification framework that combines TLA+-style model checking with formal proofs and enables AI-powered invariant inference. proofsandintuitions.net/2026/02/09/d...

Thanks a lot to @umathur.bsky.social and Djordje Zikelic (as well as to @93mschwarz.bsky.social) for organizing the second edition of the Singapore Programming Languages Summit! It's great to see the growing community of PL researchers in Singapore. sg-pl-summit.github.io

We are hiring! Suzanne Embury and I are looking for a talented Ph.D. student 👩‍🎓👨‍🎓 to join an exciting, high-impact project on automated testing and bug fixing of Formal Methods tools. www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Gaetano's paper on Scaling Security Testing by Adressing the Reachability Gap has been accepted at #ICSE26! 📝 gpsapia.github.io/files/ICSE_2... 🧑‍💻 github.com/GPSapia/Reac... How to scale automatic security testing to arbitrary systems?

Had a blast at my first Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Mentor Summit. My personal highlight was speaking with the developers of many important open-source projects and learning about the various challenges they face. Hopefully, we can help address some of those with our research.

Super excited by the SPLASH ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) results! @junwenan.bsky.social won the gold medal in the graduate category, while Emily Ong won in the undergraduate category! By the way, Junwen is looking for summer internship positions.

A reminder that we will have another @icfp-conference.bsky.social/SPLASH nature walk planned for tomorrow. Consider joining if you are (still) in Singapore! 2025.splashcon.org/attending/ou...

It seems the first hike as part of @icfp-conference.bsky.social/SPLASH went well! A shoutout to @ningkeli.bsky.social and Yibo DONG (as well as my wife, Ting), who guided the participants on this walk. I could unfortunately not participate, as I had to travel abroad due to an urgent issue.

I am thrilled to announce Velvet: a new foundational multi-modal verifier for imperative programs in Lean. Velvet unifies execution, testing, automated and interactive proofs; and is itself proven sound. 💻 github.com/verse-lab/loom 📄 verse-lab.github.io/papers/loom-...

One week until ICFP/SPLASH’25! conf.researchr.org/home/icfp-sp...

First Day: A New Chapter at the JKU It's Wednesday. Is this important? It's my first day in a new position. So, perhaps the real question is: what's going to be important to me from now on? stefan-marr.de/2025/10/firs...

Excited to announce that the Fray paper has been accepted to OOPSLA'25! Work led by @aoli.al with a full pastalab.org collaboration. 📄: rohan.padhye.org/files/fray-o... 💻: github.com/cmu-pasta/fray 🎥: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX6P...

Already registered for SPLASH or @icfp-conference.bsky.social? If not, check out our list of accepted papers: conf.researchr.org/home/icfp-sp... It's language implementation techniques, from debugging and JIT compiling on microcontrollers to visualizing execution patterns between CPU and GPU!

25 years of delta debugging! On this day in 2000, I presented “Simplifying Failure-Inducing Inputs” at ISSTA - now one of the most influential works in the 50-year history of Transactions on Software Engineering. Read all about its genesis and impact at doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TSE....

Do it for science!

Can we statistically estimate how likely an LLM-generated program is correct w/o knowing what is a correct program for that task? Sounds impossible-but it's actually really simple. In fact, our measure of "correctness" called incoherence can be estimated (PAC guarantees). arxiv.org/abs/2507.00057

.‪@abhikrc.bsky.social is kicking off the Fuzzing and Software Security Summer School 2025! Looking forward to a week full of exciting talks and tutorials as well as interactions.

🚀 I'll be launching the Formal Methods Engineering Lab (manchester-fme.github.io) – and I am hiring! If you’re interested, feel free to reach out.

Our USING KEY variant of recursive CTEs has landed in DuckDB 1.3 Formerly an off-the-beaten-path researchy idea, now available in a real off-the-shelf DBMS. Hooray! 🎉 duckdb.org/2025/05/23/u...

This is something we've been working on for a while, and now are thrilled to share. Veil: the first foundational framework that combines SMT-based and interactive proofs about distributed protocols, seamlessly, in Lean! Tool: github.com/verse-lab/veil Paper: verse-lab.github.io/papers/veil-...

Our department in lovely Freiburg has an opening for a Full Professorship (W3) on Software Engineering (succession of Andreas Podelski) with a more technical and formal focus uni-freiburg.de/en/job/00004...

#FUZZING'25 Deadline Extension ────── If you have not finished your #FUZZING paper yet, you are in luck! :) We decided to extend the deadline to March 26, 2025! 🔗 fuzzingworkshop.github.io //cc @rohan.padhye.org, László Szekeres, @ruijiemeng.bsky.social, @mboehme.bsky.social